Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

Twitter @haarsager

Tuesday, 19 June 2007

Sondra Russell works for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and
writes the following News Digest on a weekly basis. I think it's a
very nice piece of work, but it's distributed by email only. So she's
given me permission to quote it here so it can get RSS distribution and
also be seen by people outside of public broadcasting. Her email
address is srussell [at] cpb [dot] org. --Dennis

From
PaidContent: "Fox has tapped online TV distributor Brightcove to provide
its networks and studio with ad-supported internet video channels. The pact
will also give Fox the ability to target its broadband video directly to
specific demos."

Sony
Offers Web-Streaming Device As Option on HDTVs
From the WSJ: "The fight is intensifying in the battle to bring the
Internet -- and all the video available on it -- to a television near you. Sony
will include its Internet streaming device as an option in all of its new HD
television models this year."

HD
programming wars: Comcast says 800 HD channels by 2009
From ArsTechnica: "At a press conference I attended at CES early this
year, DIRECTV proudly announced that it would have 100 HD channels available by
year end. Comcast is trying to trump its competitor by saying that it will have
over 800 HD channels by that time."

INTERNET

YouTube
Passes Debates to a New Generation
From the NYT: "YouTube, which is owned by Google, and CNN are
co-sponsoring a debate among the eight Democratic presidential candidates on
July 23 in South Carolina, an event that could define the next phase of what
has already been called the YouTube election."

Yes,
the Screen Is Tiny, but the Plans Are Big
ESPN isn't alone. Other companies, like CBS and MTV, as well as news
organizations like The Associated Press and magazine concerns like the Hearst
Corporation, are investing in original cellphone content.

Canadian
New Media Fund Gets $27.3M from Government
From CBC: "Administered by Telefilm , the Canada New Media Fund
was created in 2001 to support the development, production, marketing and
distribution of original Canadian new media projects in both official
languages."

From
TNS Media Intelligence: "Internet display
advertising is projected to lead the market with 16.0 percent growth in 2007.
Network TV expenditures are expected to increase by just 1.3 percent. Small
declines are also projected for Radio (-0.3 percent)."

RADIO

Big
Radio Makes a Grab for Internet Listeners
From the NYT: "Confronted by a slow erosion of listeners who are turning
to iPods, podcasts and other sources for entertainment, the radio corporations
are trying to merge their over-the-air music and D.J. chatter with the
Web."

EDUCATION

NBC
Developing Educational Site for StudentsFrom the
NYT: "The network is to announce an online venture intended as a
supplement to Advanced Placement high school courses in three subjects:
American history, government and English. The effort draws heavily on its
exhaustive film and video archives."

Monday, 18 June 2007

Louise Story has a lengthy article with some good comparative analysis about ESPN's programming for cell phones, writing:

... Underlying the interest in cellphones as the Next Big Media Platform is a
generation gap: younger people use cellphones more than their baby-boomer
parents do — and for a lot more than chatting. More than three-quarters of 18-
to 26-year-olds use some type of data services — compared with 44 percent of the
general population — and their time spent messaging, downloading content,
watching video and surfing around the mobile slipstream is also higher,
according to Forrester. ¶ “For the younger generation, the mobile phone is their most relevant device,”
says Dan Novak, an executive at MediaFLO USA, a cellphone video network. “They
don’t want just clips. They want long-form programming, they want shows that are
simulcast, they basically want a TV-like experience." ...

Sunday, 17 June 2007

On May 22nd, I learned that Mike Homer, a long-time Silicon Valley executive (most recently, chairman and co-founder of Kontiki) investor, visionary, philanthropist, and family man, has a serious brain disease. I assumed it was cancer, but I later learned (link: Valleywag, including the world's worst picture of Mike) that it is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare (about 300 per year in the U.S. vs. 375 deaths or injuries from lightning) prion-based disease similar to the bovine "mad cow" disease. Mike is the founder (and funder) of Open Media Network, an effectively eight-figure gift to public media.

It turns out that the primary center for the study of this disease is in San Francisco near where he lives and the researcher who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for discovering prions is on Mike's case. On Thursday evening, a large number of Mike's friends gathered in Palo Alto to inaugurate a "fight for Mike," with the hopes of raising money for research into this devastating disease. In spite of suffering some symptoms from it already, in typical Homer fashion, Mike and his wife Kristina helped plan the event. Kara Swisher of All Things Digital writes about it and includes a video from the event (link, with better picture: BoomTown in All Things Digital) and Nick Denton in Valleywag covered the event also.

I've not written about this because initially the information was confidential and then it was just too hard to face. Over the past 27 months, I've spent dozens hours with Mike in Boston, New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Washington, and his Silicon Valley home, plus countless phone calls, on OMN business. I got the short straw to coordinate a group of public broadcasting stations and independent producers that was advising Mike on OMN and on public broadcasting. I came away, however, with a priceless graduate education. No one deserves this disease, but Mike deserves it less than most.

Kara Swisher's article lists some things that we can do to be helpful to this research. I hope that many of you will do that. I don't doubt this effort will have positive results, but I just hope it's in time to do Mike some good. By the way, some public radio readers may remember Pat Joy, the former head of Oregon Public Broadcasting radio a number of years back. Sadly, she died of CJD or something very similar.

Update, 19 June 2007:Kara Swisher has posted More CJD Info at BoomTown/All Things Digital. Importantly, it includes addresses where you can help. --Dennis

Marc Andreessen has begun blogging and so far it's a remarkable effort. Of broad interest will be a post about some unorthodox personal productivity practices that he follows. Link: blog.pmarca.com. --Dennis

Kirk at Medialoper has a funny look forward to 19 February 2009. It begins:

Medialoper: February 19, 2009 — Yesterday morning Herbert
Cackin turned on his television set to find nothing but static. Cursing, he
assumed his 25 year old Zenith had finally “konked out”. Next he turned on the
television in his bedroom only to find the same problem. Finally he tried the
set in the bathroom — same thing. At that point Cackin jumped to the conclusion
any logical person would come to.

“I was damn sure we’d had another one of them 9-11 style attacks and that
this time the terrorists killed our TVs”.

Despite the FCC’s best efforts to inform the public about the new law that
requires television stations to abandon analog broadcasts in favor of digital
broadcasts, it seems that not everyone got the message. Yesterday, after the
switch finally took place, complaints poured in to local television affiliates
around the country, and television repair shops were inundated with frantic
phone calls. ...

Link: Medialoper. If anything can make us smile over this clusterf**k, it's this. --Dennis

Joost is a peer-to-peer video distribution company started by the same guys who brought us Skype telephony.

Of it, Duncan Riley writes:

Reports that Joost is now
talking to hardware vendors about embedding Joost into set-top boxes and
televisions will change the market as we know it. ...

... Joost on an actual TV set without the need for a computer is a different
proposition. ¶ Millions of American’s pay for cable television services that require a set
top box. Imagine Joost becoming available for free on these boxes, or better
still embedded directly into television sets; Joost is currently discussing this
very option. Millions of people world wide will be upgrading to next generation
BlueRay and HDDVD players in the coming years, imagine Joost embedded as
standard in these players. Network devices that play video and music from a
network alongside standard DVD’s from companies such as Netgear and Zensonic are
growing in popularity, the move to include Joost in these sorts of devices seems
like a natural progression. ...

Earlier this week, I posted about the death at age 89 of Don Herbert (see Good-Bye Mr. Wizard). Wired News interviewed him by email last month, which is published in this article by Aaron Rowe. --Dennis

Many public broadcasting stations air candidate debates. Here's a great idea that would be easy to steal. The CNN/YouTube debates for presidential candidates will be 23 July (Democrats) and 17 September (Republicans). Luke O'Brien writes:

... The debates will feature 20-30 questions culled from a pool of possibilities
sent in by the American voter. ...
Potential questions will be posted to YouTube's YouChoose platform, a section
tagged specifically for material relating to the 2008 campaign. Questions will
not be selected based on the number of views on YouTube. Nor will the selection
process be made public, in order to prevent candidates from prepping. During the
debates, the questions will be aired on a giant video monitor. YouTubers will be
able to leave comments on the questions beforehand. They will also be able to
comment on the candidate's responses, which will be posted to YouTube after the
political showdowns have wrapped up. ...